Searching for Spooks in the Folklore of Bellows Falls, Vt.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Beautiful Victorian wood-frame houses [now defiled by section-8 single mothers with three children and their no-count, live-in boyfriends, having all kinds of babies on my dime when I can't seem to find anyone willing to carry my child.] A wide, brilliant-blue canal [which is charitably described as brilliant blue when it looks brown to me, but thanks. I mean, I suppose from the proper angle it could appear blue. In the right spot.] A town square presided over by a Florentine-style clock tower [which is nice, I will say. And there's a beautiful opera house inside, which hosted Ken Burns' new documentary the other night.] On this spring day: sunshine, folks outside the ice cream spot [the Dari Joy, the local soft-serve ice cream place, its customers' fat bellies stretching their dirty t-shirts, who automatically think you must be gay if you don't have cowshit smeared on your clothes,] the local man behind the burgeoning arts scene pedaling sedately by on his bicycle [a man who is seemingly indefatigable in his support of the town, a credit to his New York stock.] But the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft saw this benign scene differently. Here he is on the surrounding countryside, sensing what evil lies in the heart of green, pleasant and highly domesticated Vermont:
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Okay, not hieroglyphs, exactly. But petroglyphs, carved in massive chunks of fallen granite that lie along the banks of the Connecticut just where the town's first bridge was cut across the river in 1785 [petroglyphs which WOULD HAVE BEEN impressive in their antiquity had the Daughters of the Revolution or whoever not paid a stonecutter a hundred years ago to recarve them so that they stood out better --old, cool stuff being worn by the passage of time which makes them all the more historically impressive, but no, now we have wonderful one-hundred-year-old petroglyphs. Aren't they nice? And what's better --a true stroke of Vermonter genius-- the local Chamber of Commerce some twenty years ago painted them yellow. Mm hm: Yellow paint inside the grooves of the etchings. And then there's that story told to local bon vivant Chris King by his friend who speaks like Katharine Hepburn when he's high, a story about a farmer forty years ago who found a ten-foot-long fossil of some prehistoric creature, a fossil that the Village of Bellows Falls somehow thought that they had a claim to when the farmer claimed it as his as well. So Village workers hauled this beautiful fossil into the town square in front of everyone and smashed it to pieces with sledgehammers in the brilliant reasoning that no one should have it. So by all means, come to Touch Hole Junct-- er, I mean, Bellows Falls.]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/30/AR2009063001597.html
